In this book, Inglese offers a new description of the middle voice in Hittite, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The analysis is based on a corpus of original Hittite texts and is framed within current trends in linguistic typology.

This book provides a comprehensive typological account of voice syncretism, focusing on resemblance in formal verbal marking between two or more of the following seven voices: passives, antipassives, reflexives, reciprocals, anticausatives, causatives, and applicatives. It covers voice syncretism from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and has been structured in a manner that facilitates convenient access to information about specific patterns of voice syncretism, their distribution and development. The book is based on a survey of voice syncretism in 222 geographically and genealogically diverse languages, but also thoroughly revisits previous research on the phenomenon. Voice syncretism is approached systematically by establishing and exploring patterns of voice syncretism that can logically be posited for the seven voices of focus in the book: 21 simplex patterns when one considers two of the seven voices sharing the same marking (e.g. reflexive-reciprocal syncretism), and 99 complex patterns when one considers more than two of the voices sharing the same marking (e.g. reflexive-reciprocal-anticausative syncretism). In a similar vein, 42 paths of development can logically be posited if it is assumed that voice marking in each of the seven voices can potentially develop one of the other six voice functions (e.g. reflexive voice marking developing a reciprocal function). This approach enables the discussion of both voice syncretism that has received considerable attention in the literature (notably middle syncretism involving the reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative and/or passive voices) and voice syncretism that has received little or not treatment in the past (including seemingly contradictory patterns such as causative-anticausative and passive-antipassive syncretism). In the survey almost all simplex patterns are attested in addition to seventeen complex patterns. In terms of diachrony, evidence is presented and discussed for twenty paths of development. The book strives to highlight the variation found in voice syncretism across the world’s languages and encourage further research into the phenomenon.

The product of a group of scholars who have been working on new directions in Historical Linguistics, this book is focused on questions of grammatical change, and the central issue of grammaticalization in Indo-European languages. Several studies examine particular problems in specific languages, but often with implications for the IE phylum as a whole. Given the historical scope of the data (over a period of four millennia) long range grammatical changes such as the development of gender differences, strategies of definiteness, the prepositional phrase, or of the syntax of the verbal diathesis and aspect, are also treated. The shifting relevance of morphology to syntax, and syntax to morphology, a central motif of this research, has provoked lively debate in the discipline of Historical Linguistics.

Although for some scholars the very possibility of syntactic reconstruction remains dubious, numerous studies have appeared reconstructing a variety of basic elements of Proto-Indo-European syntax based on evidence available particularly from ancient and/or archaic Indo-European languages. The papers in this volume originate from the Workshop “PIE Syntax and its Development” (Thessaloniki 2011), which aimed to bring together scholars interested in these problems and to shine new light on current research into ancient Indo-European syntax. Special attention was paid to the development of the hypothetical reconstructed features within the documented history of Indo-European languages. The articles in this volume were originally published in the Journal of Historical Linguistics Vol. 3:1 (2013).

A complete tool for understanding this oldest collection (about 1650 BC) of laws made by an Indo-European people. Incorporating many tablets published since the 1959 edition, and utilizing the latest lexical and grammatical insights, the author presents the text in the "score" format with translation, commentary, glossary, indexes, plates and bibliography.

This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity, as well as on their differences and similarities, both in synchrony and diachrony, and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts, which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective, with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Medieval Latin, and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad, encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines, including pragmatics, spoken discourse, conversation analysis, discourse genres (political, commercial, notarial discourse), corpus studies, language change, pragmaticalization, and language typology.

This book sets up a consistent theoretical and terminological framework for the study of the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the terms transitivity, valency, and voice. These three concepts are at the heart of the most basic aspects of clausal structure in any language; however, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the constraints on how verbs combine with noun phrases that refer to participants in the event that they denote or to the circumstances of the event. In this book, Denis Creissels explores and accounts for the extent of this cross-linguistic variation, capturing its regularities and examining the historical phenomena that have resulted in the emergence of constructions and markers. The novel framework developed in the book allows similar phenomena to be identified across typologically diverse languages, and facilitates systematic comparison of the manifestations of these phenomena in the grammars of individual languages.